The Having of Wonderful Ideas

Eleanor Duckworth’s essay “The Having of Wonderful Ideas” (The Having of Wonderful Ideas and Other Essays, Teacher’s College Press, 1987) proposes a radical way to support learning and intellectual development.

In my paraphrase: her idea is to give the learner a relatively unstructured, but well-equipped space in which to explore, and create hypotheses, and construct experiments, and ask questions, and ultimately have wonderful ideas about, the stuff of the world. Which her research shows helps people learn better and intellectually develop more.

I propose a session in which we imagine what it would be like to construct these kinds of environments in higher education, in various traditional disciplines, and of course in the Digital Humanities, and in our various workplaces, and what it would be like to learn in them, and how we would assess them.

People interested in this will have to read the article prior, due to our shared commitment to intellectual rigor and general conscientiousness, which suggests we should hold it in the afternoon, but it’s only 14 pages, and I’m sure we can figure out how to get appropriate access to all interested.

Results will be gathered in a collaboratively-edited google doc and will revolutionize the world.

About the author

I try to understand teaching and learning and organize people to collaboratively identify related challenges and develop and test experimental solutions

Permanent link to this article: http://newengland2011.thatcamp.org/10/18/the-having-of-wonderful-ideas/

THATCamp in Brief

THATCamp New England is an unconference that brings together scholars working in the digital humanities. The 2011 meeting will be held at Brandeis University. The main unconference will be held on Saturday, October 22, 2011. Several BootCamp sessions intended for digital humanities beginners will be held the Friday afternoon before, October 21.

Lightning Presentations (AKA Dork Shorts)

Do you want to give a lightning presentation at THATCamp NE? Sign up here.

The Proceedings of THATCamp

Has there been a blog post, tweet, project, session proposal, or the like that should be published in The Proceedings of THATCamp? If so, please nominate it here.